For those who may be too young to know it, since the 1930s up to the late 1960s, the only place In Gapan where one could get halo-halo was the store of my Lola Rita Garcia-Ramos a stones throw away from the church along Delos Reyes Street in San Lorenzo. She used old family recipes for her ingredients which she insisted on preparing by herself to assure quality. Her halo-halo came in a tall glass with creamy leche flan and pure ube cooked with carabao milk, freshly grated soft coconut meat, kaong, preserved langka prepared from scratch, native melon when in season, imported canned sweet corn when she unexpectedly ran out of any of the other ingredients, all buried in finely shaved ice, smothered with milk, at times topped with roasted pinipig when available and eaten with a long-handled teaspoon, accompanied by biscuits and cookies of ones choice regularly delivered by a bakery in Pampanga and displayed in huge garapons lined up at the center of each long table. Halo-halo with sweet red mongo, beans, diced banana or camote, or gelatin -- NEVER; too pedestrian for Lola Ritas refined taste. Her customers included the high and the mighty in Gapan at that time. During summer, the children of the Valdez, Cuizon, Payawal, Gonzalez Liwag, Adorable, Jacinto, Valmonte and Garcia families, among others, would troop to her store after a tennis or basketball game, or while waiting for the start of the Viernes Santo procession that invariably passed in front of her store. Gapan lost a much beloved institution when Lola Rita decided to retire and close her halo-halo store when she was about 90 years old. She died at age 98.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 05:15:17 +0000
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